The One with a Wriggly Worm

Abstract

In his delightful little book Letters to a Young Novelist Mario Vargas Llosa describes the writer as someone afflicted with a “tapeworm.†His own life—why, even his own will— is forfeit to this creature; whatever he does is for the sake of this grisly monster. What about his themes? Well, he feeds off of himself, like the mythical “catoblepas.†So writing is a calling and one writes from an inexorable inner compulsion, unlike the “graphomaniacs†Kundera deplores. The compulsion arises from what some might call the wayward desire to see a different world in place of the real, with its inherited values and mores and certainties that admit of no contradiction and stifle questioning. Seen from this vantage, the fictional landscape of Urdu would appear hauntingly bleak, with only a few occasional lights shining palely in the gathering gloom, and out there, somewhere in the distance, suddenly a relentless, single spectacular starburst—Saadat Hasan Manto.